With a new quarter just under way, it's a good time to look back at the key investment trends over the last five years. The five-year period is part of a bull market that started in March 2009, when the economy was emerging from the most frightening financial crisis in decades. The recovery and expansion is now the second longest in modern U.S. economic history.

After rising steadily in 2012 and 2013, the Standard & Poor's 500 traded sideways from mid-2015 to mid-2016 - nosediving in rapid double-digit descents in October 2014, August 2015, and February 2016. Share prices of America's largest publicly-held companies broke out after the November 2016 election, and they've climbed steadily since then.